Apple released iOS 11.0.3 on Wednesday, October 11, 2017. The description of the release is as follows:

iOS 11.0.3 includes bug fixes for your iPhone or iPad. This update:

Fixes an issue where audio and haptic feedback would not work on some iPhone 7 and 7 Plus devices

Addresses an issue where touch input was unresponsive on some iPhone 6s displays because they were not serviced with genuine Apple parts

It so happens that I repaired my iPhone 6s screen recently with an apparently reputable, but non-Apple replacement screen.

Old screen, miscellaneous tools and the new screen installed.

Since the repair, I had noticed a few times when the touch screen became completely unresponsive. This was disconcerting at first, because an iPhone that doesn’t respond to any tap, touch, drag, etc. is pretty much a useless brick. However I found that just waiting about 1 minute or so with the screen off would bring it back to life. Since it didn’t happen but a few times, and since I knew a workaround, I didn’t complain to anybody.

Apparently, this was happening to enough people to reach the ears of Apple.

I want to give Apple a big thank you for putting in a software fix to work around a hardware problem that was not their fault. They could have done nothing. Some companies have gone so far as to deliberately disable unauthorized 3rd party hardware. Not Apple. Apple stuck by their customers, and this customer intends to stick by Apple.

Apple customers who used 3rd party replacement screens escaped with only a stern talking-to:

Note: Non-genuine replacement displays may have compromised visual quality and may fail to work correctly. Apple-certified screen repairs are performed by trusted experts who use genuine Apple parts.

While we’re on the subject of screen repair. Although I did successfully repair my own iPhone screen, I can’t really recommend doing it yourself. The process involved a jeweler’s magnifier, a guitar pick, a suction cup and six or eight nearly microscopic screws. I came extremely close to letting the magic smoke out of my iPhone. (Smoke must be what makes it work, because if the smoke ever comes out, it doesn’t work any more!)

I got away for about $50, but the folks who install a genuine Apple screen for, say, $150 are earning their money.

In the process of helping older people with their iPhones and iPads, I have noticed certain problems common to many older users and solutions for some of those problems.

Unintended Actions

The first type of problem is unintended actions. This is when someone intends to do one thing, but accidentally does another. This can be as simple as typing the wrong character, but often includes major things like accidentally opening another app or pressing delete instead of save. I often see accidental swipes. The user intends to press a button or icon, but, perhaps due to poor motor control, instead swipes. Depending on the context, and where a swipe occurs, surprising things happen: the search window pops up, an email is deleted, etc.

One person asked me what the control center was and why it keeps popping up from the bottom of the screen. This was happening when she accidentally swiped up from the bottom of the screen invoking the control center.

You can make this less likely by turning off the control center from within apps. It can still appear on the home screen, but won’t pop up within any app. This setting is in Settings:Control Center:Access Within Apps.

I turned that off on my own phone and realized that I had probably been invoking Control Center more often by mistake than on purpose.

Touch Accommodations

Another very useful setting is in Settings:General:Accessibility:Touch Accommodations. If you turn on Touch Accommodations, the whole touch screen interface becomes less sensitive, and requires more deliberate actions. Buttons and other controls won’t activate until you press them for at least 1/10 of a second. That doesn’t sound like very long, but it makes a huge difference. Many accidental swipes and clicks will be eliminated.

Once enabled, you can adjust the delays. The default durations are probably okay for most people. If the user has severe tremors, then these settings can be increased. It might take a little bit of time to get used to this mode, but it can be worth it.

The iOS Touch Accommodations Setting Screen

Overlooked Controls

The second category of problem is the “Oh, I didn’t know you could push that.” problem. iOS conceals many options behind innocuous looking symbols or words which are actually buttons that you can click, leading to useful functions. Often, people don’t notice those, or don’t realize that they are buttons.
There is a setting, General:Accessibility:Button Shapes, which outlines text buttons with a grey shape, making them look more like buttons. For example, notice how the word General has a gray background in the screen shot below.

Button Shapes turned on. Notice the “General” button at top.

Try these settings for yourself or for your older friends and relatives. They could lead to a calmer, less frustrating experience with the iPhone or iPad.

I set out recently to find a shared iOS shopping list App to replace my family’s paper grocery shopping list. I had some pretty simple requirements:

Easy-to-use sharing between family members using different iCloud accounts

Ability to review the list in the store and mark items off

Ability to review and revive completed items (We’ve got milk this time, but we’ll need it again soon)

I spent some time in the App store looking at reviews and didn’t see anything I wanted to buy. Some otherwise useful apps had a bad reputation for crashing. Others were just too complex. Some needed a subscription and a sign-on for sharing to work. It’s just creepy that the vendor would be watching everything on your shopping list.

Eventually I found it. An app that was already on my phone that met all my requirements and didn’t need any additional sign-ups, plus you can use Siri to add items to the list by voice.

Controversy Since iWork ’09

When the new version of Numbers for the Mac came out some features were dropped. Most of them have not been added back in. Reviews of the apps have been definitely mixed. Numbers only gets a 3-star rating on the App store (both versions).

Ratings for Numbers on the Mac App Store

Two-and-a-half to three stars is a pretty terrible rating, especially for an Apple app. As you can see, the ratings are very mixed with most reviewers giving either one star or five-star ratings. The ratings for the iOS version are very similar.

Guide to Star Ratings

The one-star reviews are mostly from people upset about advanced features removed from the previous version. The five-star reviews tend to be from people who have come to the application fresh, with no special expectations.

Numbers includes hundreds of distinct features. The chart below highlights just a few of my favorite features as compared with Microsoft Excel.

Comparison of Features Between Numbers and Microsoft Excel

Documents, Sheets and Tables

Numbers documents can have multiple sheets. Each sheet can have multiple tables. When you create a new Numbers document, it has one sheet with one table on that sheet.

If you have used Excel, having multiple sheets should be familiar. The main difference is that the sheets appear at the top of the window instead of at the bottom.

The concept of having multiple tables on a single sheet may be new to users of older spreadsheet programs. It is a very nice feature, which allows you to separate groups of data or formulas which are of different types instead of lumping them all into the same grid of rows and columns. You can arrange the tables on the page however you like.

This document has two sheets. Sheet 1 has two tables.

Formatting Controls

Table Style Controls

Numbers uses a consistent set of formatting controls very similar to those in the Pages word processor we discussed last month. These are presented in a pane on the right hand side of the window. These controls look simple, but all together, they have a lot of power. In addition to the pre-defined Table and Text styles, you can create and save your own preferred styles.

Formula Editing

Type an equals sign to enter formula editing mode for a cell. Color coding appears showing the source cells used in your formula. This makes it easier to understand if your formula is correct or to see the source of errors.

When you copy or fill a formula into additional cells, Numbers automatically adjusts cell references relative to the current cell. If you want to override that to select an absolute row, absolute column, or absolute cell, you can use the Preserve Row/Preserve Column options.

The Numbers Formula Editor

Importing Files From Excel

A common task in Numbers would be to open an Excel document created by someone else. This can work fairly well, but is not completely painless.

Original Excel Template on left, Numbers Import on right

This imported okay, and the amortization calculations agreed, but the date formulas were not imported correctly and would have to be re-done in numbers.

Large Files

One of our members asked how Numbers was at handling large files imported from Excel. To test this I created a large spreadsheet in Excel with 40,000 rows and about 14 columns. The file size in Excel was 3.7 Megabytes. Numbers opened it without complaint, but it took about 30 seconds. When saved as a native Numbers document, its size increased to 6.3 Mbytes, but the native document opened in Numbers in about five seconds.

Although I didn’t get any warnings in Numbers, I did get one “Not enough memory” message in Excel while cutting, pasting and filling to create the document. Excel handled it gracefully without crashing.

iOS Numbers App

The Numbers app on iOS is deliberately very similar to the version for Macintosh.

Numbers App on iPhone

FYI, Excel also has an iOS app which is free in the App store. It looks like this:

Excel on the iPhone

The Excel app is apparently read-only until you register for and log in to a Microsoft Office 365 account.

Conclusion

If you want a spreadsheet program to perform the usual tasks of calculation, sorting and organizing, and you don’t have much prior experience with spreadsheets, you will find Numbers a very useful application. It’s especially easy to learn because of consistent controls across Mac and iOS versions and consistency with Pages and Keynote.

If you know what a pivot table is, or have a lot of spreadsheets already in Excel format, you may be dissatisfied with the limitations of Numbers.

I’ve met several people who say they just want to use Facebook or email, but are having problems using their iPhone. They are often surprised by the results of their actions, and sometimes flail away at the screen in frustration.

Trying to use Apps on the iPhone (or iPad) without understanding the basic gestures is like hopping in a car, wanting to drive across town, without being quite sure what those pedals on the floor do.

Here’s a quick rundown of the iPhone controls and what to expect from them. I’ve seperated gestures you make on the touch screen from operations involving the power button, the home button and the whole phone. Many of the functions I have indicated below can be customized in Settings, but these are the default actions. Gestures may have special meaning within certain Apps, but these are the most common usages.

Starting at the very beginning, here’s how to use the power button, located on the upper right side of your phone. Holding the power button for 3 seconds brings up the Slide to Power Off screen. If your phone is powered down, you will need to hold the power button for a few seconds until you see the Apple logo and the phone begins powering on.

Here’s what you can do with the Home Button at the bottom center of the iPhone/iPad. Touch ID is only available in the iPhone 5s and newer. For a click, press hard. For a tap, just touch it lightly. Only a light touch is needed for the fingerprint sensor. If anybody knows some function that requires only a single tap of the home button, please leave me a comment.

There are a few things you can do with your whole phone, without pushing any buttons. When you phone is asleep, lifting it to a vertical position momentarily turns on the screen so you can see the time, date and notifications.

Here are the gestures for the iPhone touch screen. These are the most commonly used and the area where people have the most trouble. In particular, the iPhone is very sensitive to any sideways or vertical motion of your finger when you touch the screen. If it notices any motion, your gesture is interpreted as a swipe instead of a tap. Tapping is probably the most common gesture, so it’s important to master it. When tapping make sure you move your finger up and down only, without sliding it sideways at all.

One of the most common problems with the touch screen is unintended actions. The screen is very sensitive to the slightest touch. In fact, it will sometimes sense a touch if your finger is just near the screen. So, keep all your fingers away from the screen until you actually want to do something.

Remove your finger promptly when tapping or you will get a Press & Hold. If you want to use Press & Hold, you don’t have to press hard, just rest your finger — again, no sliding. This is probably most useful to open the sharing menu for a photo.

These are special, iPad-only gestures:

For a device with such an easy-to-use reputation, this is a pretty big list. But, make sure you understand these and you will have a much easier time using your device.